


looking forward

by dirgewithoutmusic



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Short, Tumblr Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-07
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:21:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24587530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dirgewithoutmusic/pseuds/dirgewithoutmusic
Summary: Neville Longbottom thinks about the future.
Comments: 31
Kudos: 520





	looking forward

**Author's Note:**

> Answer to the prompt: Neville + colours

After the war, Neville went to college. 

Back when he was in school, he wasn’t sure what he was going to do, after. He wasn’t sure the kind of person his grandmother wanted him to grow up to be. Neville got the feeling that, once, she’d had a plan for him. She’d had an ideal grandson in mind, one who… went into business, maybe? Married up? Did a sport? 

But this was the grandson she’d gotten, so she seemed to have filed those dreams away. Instead of specific disappointment, the kind that would at least give him a goal to miss at, he received a general malaise of it in her letters, her monthly afternoon teas, and her sighs. 

He hesitated to say that when the war came he got less sure what he was going to do. It was true, certainly, that he got less sure what he was going to do when the war ended. He wasn’t sure he’d be around when the war ended. He wasn’t sure the war would end. He didn’t think about the war ending, mostly, because there was war, now. He had work to do. 

So in some ways, he was more sure, then. He didn’t know what he was going to do after the war, but he knew what he was doing in the next breath, the next moment, the next day. He had work to do. He liked that, in its way. 

His grandmother retired to her estate for the duration. She told him to come hide behind her wards, as the last scion of Longbottom, and to stay safe. He went to Hogwarts, instead. He told her his plans in a letter, because he was busy, because they needed him as soon as he could get there, because he didn’t want to see her face and know whether or not that disappointed her, too. 

She wrote back. She critiqued his penmanship. Ginny told him, “Fuck her,” and Luna bought him a transcription quill. 

After the war, Neville went to college. It took him a year or two of odd jobs to decide to do it. Hermione started talking about it, one day, over lunch near the cafe partway between the Ministry where she was an interning and the herbalist’s where Neville was cleaning floors and counting leaves. Hermione talked the way Hermione always talked– too fast, too many words, a fire inside her. Neville always wondered how she slept, if she slept, with those many words all clattering inside of her. 

He liked the herbalist’s office he worked in. He liked the thick, sharp smells of it. He liked carefully measuring things and counting them out, learning all their names. He liked the colors of the leaves and flowers and seeds, how the colors told you things about them– their identity, or age, or quality. It was a language you could learn, if someone explained it to you quietly, patiently. It was something you had to wait for– flowers to dry, tinctures to brew, sprouts to grow. He liked that. It was good. 

He looked around the shop sometimes and wondered what it would be like, to have a place like that be yours. To have people walk into your shop, through the door that had your name on it with a few little letters after it. To have people ask you for things, for things that would help them, and with your work and your knowledge and your patience to hand them something that would. 

Hermione started talking about college, one day, over quiche and fruit salad, and Neville thought about the diploma in his herbalist’s office. He thought, _I could do that_. Neville thought, _I want to do that_ , and he did. 


End file.
